Obama and the Bush Legacy: A Scorecard
John Cassidy
With two George Bushes and their wives visiting the White House today for the unveiling of George W.’s official portrait, how much of the Bush legacy remains in place? The election of 2008 was a classic “time for a change” contest, in which Americans picked a fresh-faced young senator to replace an increasingly haggard and unpopular President. Three and a half years later, what’s different?
Some things are; some aren’t. Here is a quick (and far from definitive) scorecard. But first, a warning: this isn’t an exercise in judging Obama. In some areas, such as dealing with the Supreme Court, he was powerless to undo Bush’s handiwork. In other areas, such as Afghanistan, he set out to complete Bush’s agenda rather than overturn it. But it’s always interesting to compare Presidencies and to try and figure out what, if anything, they leave behind that’s lasting. So here goes:
1. Iraq: To a large extent, it was Obama’s anti-war stance that won him the Democratic nomination. A month after taking office, he said the combat mission would end by August 31, 2010, with a transitional force of up to fifty thousand soldiers remaining in Iraq until the end of 2011 at the latest. This timetable was carried out successfully: the last U.S. combat brigades rolled into Kuwait in August, 2010, and the final members of the transitional force left on December 18th of last year, following a breakdown in negotiations about maintaining a U.S. presence.
Today, there are a few hundred U.S. military personnel left in Iraq, operating out of the vast U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The C.I.A. also retains a substantial presence, and there are thousands of security contractors working for the State Department in Baghdad and other cities. But for all intents and purposes, the U.S. military occupation is over.
Score one for Obama.
2. Afghanistan: Obama’s anti-war reputation was always a bit misleading. In the summer of 2008, he vowed to step up military operations in Afghanistan, calling it “the real center for terrorist activity that we have to deal with and deal with aggressively.” At the time, there were about thirty thousand U.S. troops in the country. Today, there are about ninety thousand, roughly a quarter of whom are due to leave by the end of the summer. Obama has vowed to end the occupation by the end of 2014, and the results of his “surge” are hotly debated.
In his recent televised speech from Kabul, Obama said the U.S “broke the Taliban’s momentum” and has “built strong Afghan security forces.” But many independent analysts, such as Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believe the military strategy has failed. Meanwhile, the U.S. death toll continues to mount. At the start of 2009, when Obama took office, about six hundred and twenty-five U.S. military personnel had died as a result of the invasion of Afghanistan, according to the Associated Press. Today, that number stands at eighteen hundred and fifty-seven.
Score one for the Bush legacy.
3. Tax cuts: In a series of bills passed between 2001 and 2003, George W. slashed the rate of taxation on ordinary income, dividends, and capital gains, giving a huge handout to high-income households. As a candidate, Obama vowed to repeal the cuts for households with incomes of more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It didn’t happen.
Following the financial crisis of 2008, the Administration was reluctant to raise taxes on anybody for fear of making the economy worse. During the 2010 mid-term elections, Obama returned to a theme of making the tax system fairer. But after the Republicans swept to victory, he agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years in exchange for Republicans agreeing to extend unemployment benefits and cut the payroll tax. The tax cuts are now due to expire at the end of this year, but it’s not clear whether that will happen.
Score another for the Bush legacy.
4. Wall Street: In a March, 2008, speech at Cooper Union, Obama delivered a robust defense of financial oversight, depicting the deregulation of the Clinton and Bush years as a “corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy.” In July, 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and beefed up the powers of other regulators, including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.
The reforms didn’t go nearly as far as many commentators, myself included, would have preferred. With the help of congressional Republicans, financial lobbyists managed to water down some of the bill’s provisions, such as the Volcker Rule and rules regarding the trading of complex derivatives. But the bill still amounted to the most significant piece of regulation in decades, and, together with the imposition of tougher capital requirements for big banks, it has changed how Wall Street operates—to some extent, anyway.
Score one for Obama.
5. Health care: George W.’s approach to health-care reform, such as it was, involved introducing a costly prescription-drug program to Medicare and encouraging people to set up tax-free Medical Savings Accounts to pay for future health-care costs. For people who didn’t receive health insurance from their employers and who couldn’t afford to purchase it on the open market, he proposed (but didn’t introduce) tax breaks of up to three thousand dollars. For his reform bill, Obama, after initially supporting a public option, also chose to work with the existing system of private insurance. But in mandating that individuals buy coverage, in setting up health-insurance exchanges, and in establishing a system of big and costly subsidies for low- and middle-income families, he went far, far beyond Bush’s modest agenda.
Score another one for Obama.
6. The Supreme Court: George W.’s most lasting legacy may well have been his creation of a conservative majority on the high court under Chief Justice John Roberts. Obama, not through any fault of his own, has been unable to alter the court’s balance. (His two moderate-liberal appointees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both replaced moderate justices.)
Sometime in the next few weeks, the Court will rule on the President’s signature policy initiative: health-care reform. If it throws out all or part of Obamacare, the power of the Bush legacy will be clear to all. Even if the health-care bill, or most of it, survives the coming decision, the Court is set to play a key role in the election. Its controversial 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case has set off a fund-raising free-for-all, which, so far, is benefitting Mitt Romney more than Obama. If the President were to lose in November, many of his supporters would blame the Court.
Score another for the Bush legacy.
7. Gay rights: In ending the military’s policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and, more recently, expressing his personal support for gay marriage, Obama has definitely broken with the Bush legacy. Back in 2004, George W. came out in favor of a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to a man and a woman. Last year, one of his daughters, Barbara, who lives in New York, taped a video expressing support for legalizing gay marriage. Neither of her parents commented on the video.
Score one for Obama.
8. Workers’ rights: After eight years of anti-union policies under George W., Obama vowed to change course. He expressed support for a “card check” bill, which would have allowed workers to form a union once they had collected the signatures of a majority of their colleagues. Despite the President’s support, the bill never made it through Congress. However, Obama did make a number of administrative changes that favored unions, such as strengthening regulations on the distribution of federal contracts and appointing sympathetic people to the National Labor Relations Board, which investigates unfair labor practices.
Last year, the N.L.R.B. infuriated Republicans by objecting to Boeing’s decision to establish a production line for the 787 Dreamliner, its next big plane, in non-union South Carolina. (The case was later settled.) This sort of stuff doesn’t grab many headlines. But the hysterical attacks on the N.L.R.B. by business interests and congressional Republicans indicate that it is important.
Score another for Obama.
9. The war on terror: In publicly disavowing the use of torture, including waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, Obama made a big break with the Bush Administration. He also made some significant reforms to the military-tribunal process. But he didn’t close Guantánamo Bay, and he abandoned efforts to bring senior Al Qaeda members to trial in the United States. Meanwhile, he expanded covert anti-terrorism operations, including the use of drones to carry out targeted assassinations in foreign countries.
As a remarkable story in the Times about the drone campaign made clear, and as my colleague Amy Davidson has already commented upon, Obama regularly oversees “Terror Tuesday” meetings at which he authorizes (or refuses to authorize) individual strikes in places like Yemen and Somalia. The war on terror is alive and well, and so is the expansion of Presidential power that George W. championed.
Score one for the Bush legacy.
10. The environment: When Obama came to power, environmentalists had great hopes. Today, many of them are disappointed. The President botched efforts to push cap-and-trade legislation through Congress, his Environmental Protection Agency abandoned efforts to strengthen anti-smog regulations, and his Administration approved more offshore drilling. Last year, some Obama supporters were so furious at his record that they compared him to George W. That was unfair. The Obama Administration has expanded land and water conservation programs; it has provided generous subsides to alternative energy producers; it has toughened up emissions standards for cars and factories; and it has put the Keystone XL pipeline on hold. But the candidate who in 2008 described global warming as an existential threat has yet to come up with a credible strategy, domestically or internationally, to reduce carbon emissions in a significant way.
Score another one for the Bush legacy.
By my tally, that’s 5-5: Obama has consigned some of the Bush era to history, but by no means all of it. Since his party was in control of Congress for just two years, and he had an economic crisis to deal with, that perhaps isn’t too surprising. But the people who’d expected him to fulfill all his promise still have plenty of reason to be disappointed.
Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/GettyImages.